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20140411 (F) Upcycled 3D Printer

Sometimes shopping locally is a bust and sometimes a boon. Sometimes little shops will charge you through the nose and sometimes they will give you exactly what you need for a song. They are always more interesting than a big box.

Enough background.
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More scouting was done to find suitable parts from the list. A hobby shop was visited to find a continuous rotation servo or a gear motor. The continue rotation servo in stock was underpowered for the application. The gear boxes were expense for what they were. Small gears were purchased to attempt to create a gear system for lowering the platen and pushing a glue stick. The gears will likely be held by using wire brads in a wooden structure. A bear box will not have feedback like a servo so some kind of speed monitoring will be used. Most likely a small magnet on a gear matched to a reed switch. The speed monitoring could record the number of motor rotations each time the planted is moved or each time the glue is pushed. If a suitable gear box cannot be built servos will replace the gears on the parts list. Salvaged motors from RC vehicles will be experimented with . The motors already have gears on their shafts.

A local bike shop helped select matching sprockets and a piece of chain long enough to catch all the sprockets. The shop was Bicycle Chain.

Another thrift store was visited and a second option for a water container was purchased. It was a square container but the three shaft design will be kept.

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I started playing Pokémon GO when it came out. While playing I talked with a couple players, it's surprising social, and I heard about the bonuses from perfect throws. A throw is when you are facing a wild Pokémon and toss a Pokéball in an attempt to capture it. It's the same mechanics mobile app developers use to throw darts, bowling balls, baseballs, snowballs and other. It's an swipe from the bottom of the screen upward. If the user strays left or right the projectile will stray accordingly.

The key to a successful throw is to keep the finger from deviating from the path. I got to thinking about elaborate mechanisms with two or three servos holding a stylus, an Arduino to control them, a 3D printed frame and an elaborate rig to hold all this. Then I would need a battery because it would draw a lot of power. At that point I may as well use a huge battery and power the phone too.

After I got all that out of my system I had a Eureka moment where I threw out all the elabora…

A recording area was set up in my home office which meant clearing off a particularly filthy desk and setting up a camera. A tall tripod was set up and a tablet was attached so the script could be visible while recording. The script was written to have a pun in every sentence except for one.

The first attempt went poorly because only the Pi-ano audio was being recorded and there was no good pacing without reading out loud. Recording a voice-over to poorly paced video was a lost time-gamble. Well paced audio was recorded and played back while recording all new video so the pacing was perfect. This succeeded with the first take.

Setup for recording
Audio and video were combined and cropped to make a video that was less than 1:15. The whole evening was spent to make a one minute piano video but it hammers the point home.